Leaderboard Zone

This is a clever twist on a very important emerging market of location based content, Outside.in. Check it out. Steven’s announcement here.

…the site is ultimately about a new kind of experience. You sit at a computer and type in a street address, or a neighborhood name, or a zip code — perhaps for your own home area, perhaps for a place you’re visiting or interested in — and within seconds the screen gives you a glimpse of all the textured, real-world issues and conversations and news unfolding in the location you’ve entered. Not just restaurant reviews or upcoming concerts, but the

4 thoughts on “Steven Johnson Launches Outside.in”

Blockrocker.com has been doing something similar to this for a while, but based on user tagged content – it maps events, photos, classifieds, blog posts, youtube videos, wikipedia pages, delicious tags, etc – down to the street level. Zoom in on your neighborhood, and you get an experience that sounds similar to what outside in is describing. BR, however, is content-light – there aren’t that many people out there that car enough about local level stuff to actively geotag their blog posts and del.icio.us links for instance.

I had hoped, for example, that people would geotag their delicious links for reviews of restaurants they enjoyed. The hoped for active userbase has failed to materialize however – perhaps because the site has never been promoted, perhaps because geotagging is very niche-y.

As Dreadsword says geotagging is not a mass sport, as compared with photo tagging, but there’s a niche, certainly, and word-of-mouth can make a site blossom modestly: Tagzania has grown that way. Outside.in’s approach is different, editorial work defines the places to follow, then venues and addresses there are parsed. I think that, at the end, there’s a much greater long tail of geographic content out there, than the limited universe of X US cities as followed by Y detected bloggers, and the strategy of letting users geotagging their own stuff (more the approach of Tagzania, BR and others) may be more sustainable.